Gerald Durrell has written three books solely regarding his childhood: "My Family and Other Animals", "Birds, Beasts and Relatives" and "Fillets of Plaice". In several other books he also mentions his family and early days; both greatly affected his life.

Corfu

Durrell was born in India in 19. When he was three his family moved to Bournemouth, then to Corfu, Greece, where Durrell spent the most important five years of his childhood. His father, Lawrence Samuel Durrell, died while Gerald was a baby so his mother, Mrs. Louisa Florence Durrell was left to bring four children up.
The popular accounts of the Durrell family's life in Corfu were some of Durrell's best sellers with a television comedy series being made out of "My Family and Other Animals" in the 1970s.

Durrell had always loved animals, and as a young child in Corfu his goal was to run his own zoo. His family got so annoyed with this obsession, with animals Durrell had collected escaping from his room and running rampant through the house, that they converted the spare room of their house into an animal storage room in which a young Durrell was allowed to keep specimens, taxidermy projects and scientific equipment.

Education

Some of Durrell's education was carried out by a private tutors. Lessons were often arranged to appeal to Durrell's love of nature; Geography was carried out by arranging driftwood, shells and other seaside debris into continents and countries on the beaches where Durrell swam and played. English was never a strong subject for him, so writing was not a career option until much later. By the time he was ten he had managed to rear, keep and observe hundreds of different animals, with a few tragic losses such as in the case of a family of baby hedgehogs.

After moving around Corfu into three different houses, the family was forced to move back to England after five years because of the second World War.

Family

Durrell's family played a major part in both his early life and career as a writer. At first it was hoped that his love of animals was some sort of phase that he was going through and was going to grow out of, while scorpions destroyed dinner and a donkey kicked family members (his mother states that his first word was "Zoo" and one of his clearest memories of India was finding slugs in a ditch on one of his daily trips to the local equivalent of a zoo with his ayah). But it soon it became clear that this not theb case.

The following is a list of the members of the Durrell family whilst living in Corfu.

Louisa Florence (Dixie) Durrell - Gerald's Mother
Lawrence (Larry) Durrell - Grew up to become the famous author of the 'Alexandria' series.
Margot Durrell - Talented dress designer and interior decorator
Leslie Durrell - Skilled painter, older than Gerald.

In 1939, Durrell's family moved back to England because of the war. Durrell got a job in a local pet shop, which he enjoyed. His family's apartment was not big enough to house the animals he had brought back from Corfu, but he could visit the London zoo and pet shop regularly.

At the end of the war he successfully applied for a position as a student at the Whipsnade Zoological Society park in Bedfordshire. The book "Beasts in my Belfry" describes his experiences there. Gerald learnt a lot about the animals and while he was feeding, grooming and cleaning cages he took noted his observations and compared them to some of his many wild animal books. This was where he first realised how many species were endangered and rare. It was at Whipsnade Durrell decided that if he was ever to get his own zoo, "It's main function in life would be to act as a reservoir and sanctuary for these harried creatures."

His year at Whipsnade provided him with enough experience to go on an animal collecting trip in 1947 to the British Cameroons in Africa with a three thousand pound inheritance he recieved on his 21st birthday. He and a companion returned with over a hundred mammals, birds and reptiles for British zoos. In 1949 he went on another collecting trip to the Bafut area, and the following year to British Guiana in South America in search of several rare and greatly wanted specimens.

Beginning as a Writer

These three trips left him broke, mainly because he took such care with the caging of his animals, not cramping many animals in one small cage to save buying new ones, a method many animal collectors of the time employed. So his elder brother, an author, Larry Durrell, suggested he write about his experiences as a way of making money.
Gerald started to write his first book.

The success his first book, "The Overloaded Ark" encouraged Durrell to write accounts of his other two expeditions. "The Bafut Beagles" and "Three Singles to Adventure" were also very popular.

So in 1953 Durrell returned to South America to gain more experiences and to collect some endangered specimens to bring back for the London Zoo, with his wife, Jacqueline Sonia Rasen, whom he had married in 1951. When he returned he wrote "The Drunken Forest" which was a bestseller in America and England.

In 1958 he decided to start collecting animals not for other English zoos, but for his own zoo. It had always been painful for him to part with the animals and birds that he collected on the trip. Durrell visited Argentina again and brought the animals back to his mother's place where they stayed until he found a suitable site to build a zoo. He was hoping to build on the South coast of England somewhere, possibly Bournemouth, but the government disapproved, so in 1959 he decided to locate his zoo on a 35-acre site on the Channel Islands of Jersey.

This zoo then became the Jersey Zoological Park, and the stories of struggles to get it built and run were written in "Menagerie Manor" in 1964 by Durrell.

Once the zoo was running smoothly, Durrell decided to go on several collecting trips to rescue endangered animals, to collect material for his next books and to help in the filming of rare animals for a BBC TV series. In "Two in the Bush"(1966), Durrell travels to Australia, Malaya and New Zealand. "Catch me a Colobus"(1972) describes Durrell's trip Mexico and "Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons"(1979) tells about his trip to Mauritius. As Durrell put it "Turning out books is a terrible chore" and according to him he, unlike his brother, does it only for the money and would much rather be off in Mexico chasing Volcano Rabbits.

Apart from his true accounts of animal collecting and zoo management, Durrell has also written several childrens' books ('The Mockery Bird', 'The Talking Parcel', 'The Donkey Rustlers') and one novel ('Rosie is my Relative') .

Height of Success

Gerald's type of writing appeals to a large range of people. It has been described as refreshing, straightforward, jovial, inquisitive, enthusiastic, fascinatingly detailed. When his first book was put out, reviewers both in America and England had nothing but praise for it.

Most of his books, from "The Overloaded Ark" to "Fillets of Plaice " were bestsellers all over the world. After his popular TV series in Malaya, New Zealand and Australia he featured in an animal series called "Ark on the Move" in 1981, and he was a regular guest on English TV nature shows. Several books he has written are mainly about the shooting of these features; "How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist " and "The Drunken Forest " are two.

The success he enjoyed with his zoo was initially small. It took a long time to find the right site, to let the council allow him to build on it, and to get enough money to pay for the feeding, cages, medical supplies etc. But after a few years the zoo was going well and Durrell became the acting chairman of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust, which had been one of his goals since the zoo was founded.

Durrell also had many great successes with the animals he reared and cared for. He kept a count of the endangered Pere David deer around the world and helped to breed and spread them throughout the world. Many other rare and endangered animals, birds and reptiles have been bred and sold to other zoos by Durrell, some even saved from near extinction, like the Przewalski's horse.